by Jill Lepore
The National Women’s Conference marked the high point of liberal feminism, a second constitutional convention. It had been a long and arduous century and a quarter since the first women’s rights convention in 1848 when three hundred people had met at Seneca Falls for two days. In Houston in 1977, two thousand delegates from fifty states, along with twenty thousand attendees, met for four days, producing a twenty-six-point National Plan of Action. Fifteen hundred reporters gave the conference detailed coverage, not least because it was a who’s who of American women, from anthropologist Margaret Mead and tennis champion Billie Jean King to Roe lawyer Sarah Weddington and Jean Stapleton from All in the Family, an actress whose portrait of Edith Bunker had captured the quiet misery of a blue-collar housewife.
To inaugurate the conference, a relay of more than two thousand female athletes, from long-legged marathon runners to burly field hockey players, carried a torch lit in Seneca Falls the twenty-six hundred miles to Houston, an epic distaff Olympics.39 They carried, too, a new Declaration of Sentiments, written by the poet Maya Angelou, known to television audiences for her role in the recent blockbuster, Alex Haley’s Roots. “We promise to accept nothing less than justice for every woman,” Angelou had written.40 In Houston, the last runner delivered the torch to Lady Bird Johnson, Rosalynn Carter, and Betty Ford, three First Ladies, together on a stage.
“I told Jerry I was determined to go to Houston and have my voice here,” Betty Ford said. “Jerry answered me, ‘Well, naturally.’”41
The president of the Girl Scouts of America called the conference to order when she raised a gavel once owned by Susan B. Anthony, on loan from the Smithsonian. Ann Richards, a firebrand Texas county commissioner who would later be elected governor, gave a speech about the ERA in which she talked about her younger daughter, “who cannot find women in the history text of this country in the elementary schools.” (Her older daughter, Cecile Richards, would grow up to become president of Planned Parenthood.)42
Race had divided and in the end doomed the radical women’s movement, and critics expected the Houston conference to fall apart over race, too, which seemed even more likely after the Chicana caucus walked out of a state convention in California. But, in the end, nonwhite women constituted more than a quarter of the delegates in Houston, where the Minority Caucus arguably saved the convention.43
“Let this message go forth from Houston, and spread all over the land,” said Coretta Scott King, introducing the caucus’s Minority Report. “There is a new force, a new understanding, a new sisterhood against all injustice that has been born here. We will not be divided and defeated again.”44
Schlafly, though, saw plenty of division. Women of color had a place at the convention—as leaders—but conservative women had hardly any place there at all. Schlafly had sent supporters to every state nominating convention, but only one in five women elected as delegates were conservatives.
The conference’s two most controversial proposals were a call for government funding for abortion and an endorsement of equal rights for lesbians and gay men. Friedan, in particular, had been deeply hostile to the homosexual rights movement—she thought it would doom the fight for equal rights—and had publicly regretted any perceived ties between feminism and lesbianism. Earlier in the year, Anita Bryant, a pop singer and mother of four, had launched a campaign that she called “Save Our Children.” She hoped to save children from the prospect of gay and lesbian schoolteachers (who, she implied, would indoctrinate and sexually abuse children). A former Miss Oklahoma, Bryant, a Southern Baptist living in Florida, objected to a proposed Miami ordinance barring sexual preference–based discrimination in employment, warning of Sodom and Gomorrah. Bryant’s campaign backfired. By the time the women’s convention opened in Houston, Bryant’s crusade against what she described as “a well-organized, highly financed, and politically militant group of homosexual activists” had convinced many liberal feminists, previously reluctant, to throw their support behind homosexual rights.45
A hushed silence fell over the floor when Friedan rose during the debate over the gay rights plank. To almost universal surprise, she seconded the resolution to pass it. When the resolution carried in a voice vote, lavender and yellow balloons stamped “We Are Everywhere” rained on the hall.46
Not everyone celebrated. “This is a sham,” declared a delegate from Illinois. “This conference is run by lesbians and militant feminists.” The all-conservative Mississippi delegation knelt in prayer, raising signs that read KEEP THEM IN THE CLOSET. When the abortion plank passed, women carrying a giant blown-up photograph of a fetus rushed the stage while others, in tears, sang, “All we are saying, is give life a chance.”47
Schlafly was delighted with both votes, which had been taken on the same night. “It is completely apparent now that the women’s lib movement means government-financed abortions, government-supported day care and lesbians teaching in our schools,” she told reporters. The state conferences, she said, had been so hostile to conservative women that they had driven them into STOP ERA. While the National Women’s Conference met in the Sam Houston Coliseum, Schlafly staged a counterconference, across town, in the Astrodome. At the “pro-family, pro-life” rally, fifteen thousand women and men held signs like one that read “God Made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”48
Before 1977, abortion and equal rights had remained distinct issues, with distinct constituencies. Pro-life organizations had offered very little support to the campaign to stop the ERA. In 1975, for instance, the National Right to Life Committee defeated an anti-ERA proposal. But by 1977, liberal feminists had driven from their ranks virtually all women who were opposed to abortion, and in Houston, they also drove from their ranks women who were opposed to homosexual rights. Schlafly welcomed these political exiles into her tent. Under a Pro-Woman, Pro-Life banner, she brought together people involved in what had previously been three distinct single-issue campaigns: anti-ERA, anti-abortion, and anti–homosexual rights.49
Schlafly provided the organizational strategy for this merger of causes. Her foot soldiers were parishioners in the nation’s evangelical churches.
With some exceptions, evangelicals had steered clear of party politics for more than a century. Not since the crusade against slavery had Protestant churches engaged in overt politicking, but in the 1970s, determined to protect the family and the church from the state, evangelicals joined the conservative revolution. A series of decisions issued by the Supreme Court contributed to this turn. In 1961, the court overturned a Maryland law that required an employee to declare his belief in God. In 1962, it declared mandatory school prayer unconstitutional, and in two decisions in 1963 it struck down other forms of mandatory religious expression in schools: Bible reading and the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Then, in 1971, in Coit v. Green, the court ruled that racially segregated private schools were not eligible for tax-exempt status. Under the post–Coit v. Green regime, private religious schools no longer provided a refuge for whites opposed to integration. Religious schools in the South investigated by the IRS included Bob Jones University and a school in Lynchburg, Virginia, run by the Southern Baptist Jerry Falwell, who had long since earned a national following as host of the weekly Old-Time Gospel Hour, a folksy television program in the tradition of the popular gospel radio shows of the 1920s and 1930s. Falwell, his black hair slicked back, sat before a curtain, his hands resting on his Bible, preaching plainly. Coit v. Green, an affirmation with no accompanying opinion, at first received little attention outside the schools affected by it. Later, it became useful to those Cold War conservatives who were segregationists: they attacked it as the latest in a series of rulings that, instead of realizing the constitutional promise of the Fourteenth Amendment and abiding by the court’s decision in Brown v. Board, promoted communism. “This drive to root God out of our national life is the realization that America cannot be effectively socialized until it is secularized,” said Strom Thurmond.50
Green’s signific
ance, however, was limited. In the end, evangelicals were drawn into the conservative coalition by their religious beliefs, not by opposition to desegregation. In any case, opposition to desegregation did not chiefly come from evangelicals, nor was it limited to the South. Instead, it took different forms in different communities and in different parts of the country. In 1974, whites in Boston rioted over “forced busing,” mandatory desegregation of the city’s schools, earning for the home of the “cradle of liberty” a new moniker, the “Little Rock of the North,” a call back to the terror of 1957. Unable to defeat mandatory desegregation, whites in many cities either sent their children to private schools or left for the suburbs; between 1974 and 1987, the number of white students in Boston’s public schools dropped from 45,000 to 16,000.51
Paul Weyrich, Heritage Foundation political strategist, and Richard Viguerie, former Goldwater Republican and direct-mail executive, had long been laboring to bring evangelicals into a new conservative coalition by appealing to them on all sorts of issues. They soon recruited Falwell, who in 1979 founded the Moral Majority—the phrase, an echo of Nixon’s Silent Majority, was coined by Weyrich—to fight against “secular humanism.” Falwell, leaving his plain preaching behind and growing more and more strident, announced, “We are fighting a holy war, and this time we are going to win.” To wage that holy war, Falwell rallied his followers around the issues with which Schlafly had already recruited an army: opposition to gay rights, sexual freedom, women’s liberation, the ERA, child care, and sex education, and, above all, abortion.52
Falwell would later maintain that this political crusade had begun, for him, in 1973, the moment he read of the court’s decision in Roe. But that was far from the case. Southern Baptists had, in fact, earlier fought for the liberalization of abortion laws. In 1971, the church’s national convention, meeting in Missouri, passed this resolution: “We call upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The Southern Baptist Convention reaffirmed this resolution in 1974 and used similar language in 1976. Pat Robertson, another Southern Baptist minister, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, called abortion “a strictly theological matter.” Falwell’s change of heart and the evangelical turn against abortion struck some Catholics as belated and insincere. In 1982, the founder of the American Life League sneered, “Falwell couldn’t spell abortion five years ago.”53
For the Republican Party, a day of judgment had come. Reagan, sixty-nine, had been the party’s most powerful conservative since his election as governor of California in 1966, though he had stood largely in the wings, stage right. Defeated by the moderate Gerald Ford for the presidential nomination in 1976, it nevertheless seemed to Reagan and his devoted supporters that his time to lead the nation had finally arrived. He had Schlafly’s support. And evangelicals had joined the conservative coalition. During the campaign, Falwell was said to have traveled some three hundred thousand miles; the Moral Majority claimed to have chapters in forty-seven states and to have registered four million voters. Pat Robertson, together with Bill Bright, from Campus Crusade for Christ, staged a Washington for Jesus rally, a gathering of a quarter of a million conservative Christians. They took over the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention and in 1980 passed new resolutions against the ERA, abortion, and homosexuality.54
Moderates in the party—especially women—fought back, hoping to retain power. On the first day of the party’s 1980 convention in Detroit, Jill Ruckelshaus, the wife of William Ruckelshaus and sometimes known as the “Gloria Steinem of the Republican Party,” spoke at an equal rights rally of 12,000. She wore suffragist white. “My party has endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment for 40 years,” Ruckelshaus noted. “Dwight Eisenhower endorsed ERA. Richard Nixon endorsed ERA. Gerald Ford endorsed ERA.” And then she pleaded, “Give me back my party!”55
Tanya Melich, who had helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus, decried a “Republican War against Women,” a charge Democrats made their own. Mary Crisp, RNC co-chair, was driven out. She left the party and campaigned for the independent candidate, John Anderson. Said Crisp, of the party of Abraham Lincoln and Susan B. Anthony, “We are reversing our position and are about to bury the rights of over 100 million American women under a heap of platitudes.”56
They cried in vain. Even as liberal Republicans warned that the GOP was in danger of becoming “God’s own party,” conservatives seized control—and would hold it for decades. “We’ve already taken control of the conservative movement, and conservatives have taken control of the Republican Party,” Richard Viguerie wrote. “The remaining thing is to see if we can take control of the country.”57
Reagan won the nomination, and accepted it with his characteristic cheer and resolve, with a voice perfected on the radio and a face made for television. “Three hundred and sixty years ago, in 1620, a group of families dared to cross a mighty ocean to build a future for themselves in a new world,” he said. “When they arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts, they formed what they called a ‘compact’; an agreement among themselves to build a community and abide by its laws.” Citing divine providence, Reagan proposed a new American covenant. He closed, “I’m going to suggest—I’m more afraid not to—that we begin our crusade joined together in a moment of silent prayer.” And then he bowed his head and prayed.58
Reagan’s genuine warmth suffused that final night of the convention but its days had featured fiery speeches of bitter denunciation and cold calculation. Republican moderate and longtime supporter of equal rights George Romney was reduced to calling supporters of the ERA “moral perverts.” The party’s platform committee called for a constitutional ban on abortion. Reagan’s running mate, George H. W. Bush, in a dramatic turnabout, had changed his position about both ERA and abortion. When asked about his reversals, he waved the question aside: “I’m not going to get nickel-and-dimed to death with detail.”59
The constitutional rights of women and of fetuses are not mere details. Nor were the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion “wedge” issues. The conservative takeover of the Republican Party—and, later, of Congress, the courts, and the White House—resulted from the use made by political strategists of issues that had come to be understood by advocates on both sides as matters of fundamental rights. As would be the case with the right to bear arms as well, politicians and political strategists needed these issues to remain unresolved: describing rights as vulnerable is what got out the vote.
Yet as Viguerie often pointed out, the conservative takeover of the Republican Party also marked a triumph of technology. The first mass-consumer desktop computers, like the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and the TRS-80, appeared in 1977. But long before that, Viguerie was using a mainframe. The Republican technological advantage would last for a long time; the RNC acquired its first mainframe in 1977; the DNC didn’t get its own until the 1980s.60 “Because conservatives have mastered the new technology,” Viguerie wrote, “we’ve been able to bypass the Left’s near-monopoly of the national news media.” The New Right didn’t really have new ideas, Viguerie maintained; it had new tools: “using computers, direct mail, telephone marketing, TV (including cable TV) and radio, cassette tapes and toll-free numbers among other things to ask for contributions and votes.” Viguerie was a particular master of the direct-mail campaign, which used the census, campaign finance records, polling, and election data to target individual households. “Conservatives have identified about 4,000,000 contributors,” Viguerie reported in 1980, sixteen years after he made his first list, by recording the names and addresses of 12,000 Americans who donated $50 or more to Barry Goldwater. “I estimate that the liberals have identified less than 1,500,000.” Direct mail and cable television segmented the electorate and balkanized the public. Conservatives didn’t waste their en
ergy talking to voters outside the demographic they hoped to reach, which saved them money and made their campaigns more efficient; new technologies also provided candidates with an incentive for invective. Above all, they allowed conservatives to bypass the mass media, newspapers, and the gatekeepers of broadcast television, which, increasingly, conservatives represented as the enemy.61
Nearly as influential in the rise of the New Right was the growth of the polling industry. Beginning in the early 1970s, George Gallup’s son, George Jr., a devout Episcopalian, used polls to measure the strength of the evangelical movement, even though, as critics pointed out, polling overrepresented churchgoing Americans, who, civic- and community-minded, were more likely than their fellow citizens to participate. Broader concerns about polling that had been raised in the 1930s reemerged in the 1970s. In 1972, political scientist Leo Bogart demonstrated that most of what polls do is manufacture opinion, given that a sizable portion of Americans know nothing or nearly nothing or else hold no opinion about the subjects and issues raised. “The first question a pollster should ask,” Bogart wrote, is “‘Have you thought about this at all? Do you have an opinion?’” A subsequent congressional investigation into the industry raised, once again, a series of troubling questions about the accuracy of polls, and about their place in a democracy, but a proposed Truth-in-Polling Act failed. Instead, polling grew and spread, as media corporations, equipped with computers, began conducting their own polls. In Precision Journalism: A Reporter’s Introduction to Social Science Methods, published in 1973, Philip Meyer, Washington correspondent for an Akron, Ohio, newspaper, urged reporters to conduct their own polls: “If your newspaper has a data-processing department, then it has key-punch machines and people to operate them.” Two years later, the New York Times and CBS released a joint poll—the first media-made poll. Critics pointed out that, ethically, the press, which is supposed to report news, can’t also produce it, but media-run polls exploded all the same.62
